


Swan Song

by Poetry



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Episode: s04e16 The Waters of Mars, Episode: s04e17-e18 The End of Time, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:18:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His song is ending soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swan Song

**Author's Note:**

> Co-authored with Malathyne and beta'd by Yamx.
> 
> _"Hope" is the thing with feathers —  
> That perches in the soul —  
> And sings the tune without the words —  
> And never stops — at all —_  
> \- Emily Dickinson

**I. And Sings the Tune Without the Words**

_This is a conversation the Doctor and Martha had when he came to visit UNIT with Donna. It would seem much more meaningful in retrospect. _

"I was looking at some of UNIT's old files. From a few decades back."

"Mm, were you? Fascinating history, UNIT has."

"You used to be their scientific advisor."

"Yeah, I was, a bit." Cue self-conscious neck-rubbing.

"You looked different, Doctor. Not like you at all. What happened?"

"When I die, Martha, I don't - well, I do. I die, but I'm also made into something new. It's a strange process, bit dodgy really. New face, new personality, new me, same old memories."

"What's it like? Knowing that you're going to be someone else, eventually?"

"I suppose it's like a song. Or maybe an oratorio, I like oratorios. Great big choir, each with a different face, all singing the same tune. But we've all got different copies of the music, and each of us is singing at a different tempo, or some of us have got the verses in the wrong order. It's all part of one big whole, but you'd never guess if you only heard one person sing at a time."

"I'm not sure that makes any sense."

"It doesn't make a jot of sense - but that's the way it is."

**II. And Never Stops at All**

Sometimes, knowing the things he didn't do is worse than remembering what he did.

The Doctor needs someplace empty, with only the faintest breath of life. It would only remind him of the lives he didn't save. He walks through the valleys of Mars, his boots crunching in the red dirt, and thinks about fixed points. The landscape of time isn't too different from the landscape of Mars. Most of it is just valleys, dirt that can be ground down over and over, built up and razed to the ground from year to year. Other parts of time loom like mountains, immovable.

He wonders where Jack went, afterward. Did he choose a sterile planet like Mars? Or did he find the largest spaceport he could, and disappear in the multitude? What if, somewhere, he saw a child? If he weren't such a coward, he would find out.

Later, when he tells Adelaide to imagine being in Pompeii on Volcano Day, when he tries to make her understand, he almost says this: "Imagine you had a friend. He sacrificed everything for you, and kept on doing it, even when you didn't notice, or you treated him like he didn't matter. Imagine you had an opportunity to make it all up to him. All the times you ignored him, the times you didn't thank him. But then, when the moment came, there was nothing you could do. All you could do was stand by as he lost everything."

As the screams of Adelaide's team echo in his ears, he also hears a child's scream. He thinks of a Time Lord's power, and how he might have used it.

The Doctor turns around, and runs back into Bowie Base One.

**III. To Sleep, Perchance to Dream**

The Doctor remembers the days of shorn hair and leather, when he would lie in his bed and try to get snatches of sleep between the nightmares. The TARDIS would swaddle him in song, but it wasn't her alone that lulled him to sleep. Hints of pink and gold played across his mind like sunlight on water, and something warm and deep and blue enfolded the edges of his consciousness. Together, they delivered him to his rest.

The Doctor doesn't sleep so well, these days. He runs and he runs from the summons of the Ood, filling his days with what used to be thrilling heroics and are now mere entertainments. With Rose or Jack or Donna or Martha or even Mickey, naming a galaxy Allison and saving a planet from the Red Carnivorous Maw would have been an adventure; they would have run back to the TARDIS hand in hand, their faces wide and open with laughter. Now, when he comes back to the TARDIS, he smiles out of habit, but there's no real joy in it.

He tries not to sleep, because when he does, he dreams of nothing.

**IV. A Treatise Concerning Time Lords**

_During the two hours of her existence, the DoctorDonna wrote a 400-page book in her head about Time Lords, humans, and what they could learn from each other. She died before she could write it down. This is what the book had to say about regeneration:_

Back on Gallifrey, nobody ever regenerated without a grand old ceremony and a hundred page outline of what their next self was going to be like, complete with cross-referencing and footnotes. If all this sounds boring, that's because it was. It took all the surprise out of becoming a new person.

You can say one thing for that procedure, though: it made dying easier. It wasn't just about planning out every detail of your next life (though it is a whole lot simpler becoming a new person if you know who you're going to be) but also about coming to terms with everything that happened in your last life. The ceremony was all about making amends, apologizing to everyone you've hurt so you can feel a little better about your next life. They did it all in a really boring way, but it was a good idea all the same.

It also meant you never had to die alone.

**V. Like Shipwrecks**

Jack Harkness is not a survivor.

He's known survivors. People who cling to life, who hang on the edge by their teeth and refuse to let it fall away. In the crucible of living on the edge, the jaws of Death snapping at their heels, a new conviction is forged: many before me have fallen, but I will not be defeated. The survivors emerge from their trials made anew, their grip on the world sharper than before. Meanwhile, Jack is flayed every time; whole swaths of him simply wither away with each new horror. Just when he thinks there's nothing left to lose, something new is burned away. He doesn't think he's surviving. He just doesn't _stop_.

The cantina is white noise. It's better than being alone. All around him, people are gossiping and gambling and _caring_. A shot of Ol' Janx Spirit burns smoothly down his throat.

There's a signal amid the noise now, a shape among the shifting figures that plucks some string deep within Jack and sets it buzzing. It's a vibration that radiates from his chest and stirs urgency into limbs grown leaden. It's a reaction he can't help but have to the Doctor.

A note from the gentleman in the back. Of course it's a note. There's nothing the Doctor can say. Before unfolding the note, Jack wonders what he'll see. Which words will the Doctor use to save him? "Sorry" is a word without weight; it floats by on the wind and is gone. Is the Doctor even here to save him at all?

The four words on the note aren't about getting Jack laid in a bar. He could have managed that himself, as the Doctor well knows. Alonso means more than a shag. The Doctor thinks he's someone worth loving, and that Jack is worthy of being loved in return.

The Doctor's message is simple. _Live_. Jack has no reason, except that the Doctor told him to. But maybe he'll find new reasons for living. Maybe he'll learn to become a survivor.

Maybe Alonso is a good place to start.

**VI. Rose-Tinted Glasses**

This New Year's isn't white. It's grey.

The flakes are falling bright and cold, but the snow on the streets is caked with dirt. The air is oily with chemicals belched from nearby smokestacks. Drunken shouts and snatches of bad pop music puncture the freezing air.

Rose comes, just as he'd hoped she would. She's looking up at the snow as if each flake were newly minted by some great jeweler in the sky. New Year's is an arbitrary marker of the solar cycle, as the first of April had once been in France. Still, it's special to her. Rose smiles, and the Doctor imagines she's thinking of the year to come, of all the new surprises and opportunities it might bring.

She ought to see every moment this way. The stroke of midnight on this day is no different from any other, not really. For her, every day should be a time to accept the past and look joyfully to the future. It's a lesson he learned from her in a time when he'd traveled all the universe in search of hope, and found none.

The snow is soft and whispers secrets with every step he takes. It's precisely the color of the stars, filling every rooftop and street corner with the light of the universe. The air feels like cool hands cupping his cheeks.

This is Rose's final gift to the Doctor: to allow him, for one last time, to see the universe through her eyes.

**VII. This Isn't Goodbye**

The universe is singing him to his sleep, and simultaneously he feels… everything. Grateful and bitter and comforted and … (_lonely_) everything.

The Ood song makes him think of Donna (_she cried when she heard it_), of Rose (_trying so hard to be friendly_) -- of everything he didn't understand (_I am the sin and the fear and the darkness_), of everything he'd seen (_not even the Time Lords came this far_), of everything he didn't do (_certain moments in time are fixed_).

He'd never see them again. Any of them – planets, stars, (_his_) people. Oh, sure, he'd see them again -- the Doctor will live on, that's for certain, but -- _he'd_ never see them again. Not as him. Not as this tall skinny bloke, rude and not ginger.

Hey, there he goes. Maybe he'll be ginger this time.

… But he can't even bring himself to laugh, not when there's that song playing in his head. Not when the universe is singing him to his death.

There's another song, though -- A softer one, a familiar one, sung by a familiar voice, a voice that sounds like home. It's floating there, just under the surface of the Ood's symphony, like a gentle golden whisper brushing against his mind. He knows what it is, and it makes his throat constrict. He knows it's _her_, knows it's his lullaby, his spirit song. _My swan song_, he thinks with dark humor, but the thought is softened by the golden voice of his girl.

His TARDIS is singing for him, singing his song just for _him_, and he isn't alone.


End file.
